Oran Kelley's Adverse City

The Two Cultures

2011-12-11T11:20:00.001-05:00

My title here is a phrase strongly associated with a controversy stirred up by CP Snow back in the Space Age, when many in the West feared we were falling behind the Soviets in science and technology. For the English and the American upper class, part of this worry was related to the bias of their higher education systems toward non-technical subjects. What Snow observed was that as our culture matured, the most highly educated people in the humanities tended to know scandalously little about science; and likewise, those with the greatest technical knowledge tended to be rather uncultured.

Snow was well aware that there were always and would always be exceptions to this general tendency. In fact, Snow himself was one of those exceptions, being both a respected novelist and a student of physics (he earned a doctorate in the subject). So the many takedowns of the Two Cultures idea you may find online that say, point to JBS Haldane--look, a mathematically minded scientist who could write! who knew Greek! who wrote history!--as proof there aren't two cultures, are completely missing the point. Haldane and Snow were exceptional. Snow didn't argue that it was impossible to inhabit both cultures--being who he was, how could he?--only that it was not the norm.

In speaking of Snow, we should also acknowledge how much his piece is of its time and place: Part of Snow's thesis, an important part, was his particular attack on the English school system as a source for the split between technical and cultural knowledge. (He actually holds up the American university system as a positive counterexample.)

However, the basic conflict he is observing goes much farther back, to the very beginnings of the modern world and the conflict between the ancients and the moderns in the 17th century. That conflict was essentially a conflict between ancient wisdom and modern, mostly scientific knowledge. Swift's Battle of the Books was a satiric look at this conflict which came down, as we might expect from a literary man who hated math, pretty heavily on the side of ancient wisdom. Over the long haul, though, science has mostly won this battle--shaping and changing our world to an extent that even Swift could hardly have imagined.

And, worse still from Swift's point of view, science is increasingly the arbiter of truth in our society.

But not the only one. Anyone taking a look at say, the controversies over global warming can see that science often has an uphill battle against "common sense" when its truths are inconvenient. Science is, no doubt, still the servant of our desires; though a servant upon whom we are as dependent as Wooster is upon Jeeves.

And yet our universities are--still!--filled with people who smilingly admit to incompetence in basic mathematics; who don't know anything about science aside from the fact that its advances sometimes harm the environment; people who criticize science but who cannot distinguish the real thing from ridiculous parody. If Bertie Wooster were a doctrinaire ingrate as well as an ignorant fool, he'd be the model for many of our present day humanities professors. But such a character could never win even the provisional sympathies of any reader.

Such a response to science does little honor to the tradition that Swift defended. As was the case in Snow's day--the worst offenders in the two culture business are on the side of the humanities. One is far more likely to find an articulate and cultured scientist than a scientifically knowledgeable humanities type. There are more Goulds and Lewontins and Orrs out there than there are George Levines.

Which is a shame. Because there are also scientists out there who have very little knowledge of or respect for the Western tradition who now want to explain it all for us. Who don't seem to appreciate that you cannot explain "it all" without a conception of what "it all" is. Who don't seem to realize that there simplistic explanations have been around for a long, long time, and have been roundly and soundly rejected by those to whom the phenomenon in question is most familiar.

One of the things I hope to see in future is a generation of humanities and social science people who embrace science but are not in thrall of it.

Sadly, I haven't seen much that looks much like that, though.

Our Runaway Economy

2011-12-04T10:56:00.001-05:00

I was intrigued by the dueling opinion pieces by Paul Krugman and David Brooks in this past Friday's NYT (02.12.2011). Down the right edge Paul Krugman makes his Keynesian, technocratic case for government intervention, in the fat bottom piece David Brooks extols the Germans for defending "values," "effort," "self-control," "merit," and "enterprise" in resisting that same intervention.

While Krugman's knowing, arrogant tone have long since worn thin on me, he's still a) an actual economist and b) has so far been consistently right on how this crisis would play out, as opposed to, say, folks like Niall Ferguson, who have been just as consistently wrong.

Brooks is of course right when he says that there is a political cost to the "value blindness" inherent in the purely technocratic calls for crisis intervention right now. When irresponsible governments get "bailed out" it does call the legitimacy of the status quo into question (thus, the tea party movement).

But, as Brooks acknowledges over and over again, we are in a crisis, and crises like these demand decisive actions that may or may not comport with your general morality. What crises demand is action, not actions contingent upon something else happening. If, as agreed, we have a crisis, then we need action to stave it off. It's as if I saw a car beginning to roll freely down a hill: my first action is not to seek out the driver to make him or her promise to use the handbrake in future. My first action is to see if this person was also irresponsible enough to leave the door unlocked.

Is it fair that I should have to do this? No. It's what you do to prevent a calamity.

And that gets to one of the funny little things about living in a complex society--questions like "Is this fair?" or, more generally, "Does this comport with how I conduct myself or my family life?"--are often the wrong sorts of questions to be asking. Why? Because the point of the system isn't to be fair. The system wasn't made to retell the story of Pilgrim's Progress or Horatio Alger. And this has always been the case with how the managers of that system have made their decisions.

Capitalism over the last 100 years or so has gone through some interesting developments--it's interaction with the more inclusive democractic political system has become both fruitful (witness, the postwar economic boom in the West) and more fraught (witness, the post-1980 shift in reward structure, the Occupy Wall Street movement). For people like Brooks the story of our economic system--the deserving are rewarded and the undeserving punished--is more important than tending to the technical function of the system because of that now very strong interaction between democracy and capitalism.

But the fact is, that story is a lie and always has been a lie. Are there strategies that you can find out about that are likely to lead to success in our system? Yes, certainly, particularly when it is working well. Do those strategies necessarily have something to do with deservingness by some other yardstick (moral, utilitarian)? No.

A crisis is not a time to try to shore up tired old lies: it is a time when we ought to be being a bit more honest with ourselves. If "virtue rewarded and vice punished" is what you are looking for from your economic system, capitalism is not your baby--we can condition the competition and power plays of capitalism so that we reach this outcome more often, but we have to do it. It won't do it itself. It isn't designed to do so.

And there are absolutely no economic rewards for virtue in and of itself. If your virtue turns out to be economically non-viable, you don't get an economic reward. The moral/political realm and the economic realm are separate. They interact constantly, but we should really stop encouraging people--as Brooks is urging--to think they are the same thing.

This is really part of a collective growing-up we've got to do, akin to discovering that your parents were not the paragons of the virtues they so strongly urged on you. A crisis is a time for a bit more truth. Let's acknowledge that preventing the calamity and the virtue of the people rescued from it are two separate issues to be dealt with in their own proper occasions. So lets see if that driver's side door is open, shall we?

First, Let's Get Rid of the Economic Lawyers

2011-11-10T09:13:00.000-05:00

I was amused by an exchange between Ron Paul and Ben Bernanke that happened this past summer but I only came across recently:

Paul: Do you think gold is money?Bernanke: (pregnant pause) No.It's not money?It's a precious metal.Even if it has been money for 6,000 years, somebody reversed that and eliminated that economic law?Well, it's an asset. Would you say Treasury bills are money? I don't think they're money either, but they're a financial asset.Why do central banks hold it?Well, it's a form of reserves.Why don't they hold diamonds?Well it's tradition -- long-term tradition.Well, some people still think it's money.In the U.S. anyway, those people are wrong.

From Daniel Indiviglio's blog at The Atlantic

The economic law that gold is money? I must have missed that. Is it in the Bible or something?

Amusingly, Ron Paul's fanboys think that this exchange somehow displays Paul's fantastic grasp of basic monetary issues and Bernanke's inability to deal with him. Anyone watching the video of their exchange will see Bernanke is clearly bored during Paul's Long run-up to this bit of questioning.

What all of this boils down to is that Paul believes gold has transcendent value. As established by God, no doubt and that value is to be measured only in gold. Or should we say Gold? This is merely arbitrary. An alternative fiat to fiat currency, and a bad alternative for reasons I'll explain below.

And Paul thinks that value itself has to be a transcendent. He offers no reason why this should be so.

Economic value is contingent. It always is. It is less contingent in a developed economy such as ours, but it is contingent. A smallholder brings in 100 bushels of wheat one year, and lives comfortably off the proceeds one year, the next year he brings in 150 and barely scratches a living. How could this be? 150 is bigger, and therefore more valuable than 100, no? But having 150 bushels of wheat in a year when there is too much wheat is worse than having 100 when it is scarce.

The one economic law we should all know well, the law of supply & demand, the basic observation behind capitalism, says "value is contingent." And that law applies to everything, Gold included.

Which means that the wild fluctuations we've seen in the price of gold in USD over the past 40 years or so are NOT just a reflection of the value we put in the dollar, but also a reflection of the contingent value of gold as a commodity. In a flight to quality, gold goes way up and US bond rates way down because there is additional demand for those reputed safe harbor investments, this over and above any implied valuation of the currencies involved.

Now why does gold have a reputation as a "quality" investment? Because the supply is relatively stable and predictable.

So why not tie the value of your currency to gold? Because one of the big reasons you have a currency is the first place is to enable you to manipulate its supply to deal with economic contingency. If you tie the value of your currency to gold, then you've taken this possibility off the table.

And why would you want to manipulate the supply of currency? Because economic value is not measured in Gold, it is measured in human well-being, in people eating, in their having a warm & dry place to stay, in having employment and enjoyment, in having some security in the future. That's "value." And while this definition may sound a little bit nebulous, the fact is that this gets to the real gist of the matter, where merely posited abstract, supposed absolutes, like Gold, just defer the question infinitely--isn't Gold shiny enough to make you stop asking questions?

Value is rooted in perceived human good. Full stop.

Money is an exchange medium which creates a common index to measure value of very different things, because it--money--can be exchanged for many different things--a weight of gold, some barley, a night with a prostitute, a slave, a jug of wine, a pair of shoes, the services of a porter for a day. However, because all of these things are subject to the law of supply & demand, including money itself, the value, as measured in this common index, fluctuates constantly.

Money is a representation of value. Value fluctuates constantly. And the value of the representation itself is subject to change. If the representation is easily counterfeited, it's value will inevitably fall as people do just that.

Hence gold--it is difficult to counterfeit and supply was pretty stable and it thus became a great medium for early exchange. But gold currency had its problems, too. Gold was very scarce and it was difficult to make coinage small enough to represent the value of many many trades. (Most people in the year 1000, say, would never have used a gold coin for any transaction for their entire lives.)

And since weighing coins and calculating for purity was an inconvenient process to undertake at each exchange, coin the clipping and debasing of coinage could be quite profitable enterprises for both governmental and non-governmental entities.

And the supply wasn't always stable. A major strike could wreak havoc on the value of gold as measured in (at the time) more stable commodities. For instance, after the discovery of America, or the California discoveries circa 1850, gold and silver were suddenly much easier to come by in Europe, causing inflation.

And so money was ever a problem, not just in the household economics, but also in any exchange. Coinage was non-standard in every way. The solution to this problem was representational currency. The currency would be essentially valueless in itself, but it would represent and be exchangeable for gold, which represented actual value in a hard to counterfeit way.

But that didn't solve all the problems with Gold. Over the short term, tying your economic policy to gold mean long term price stability, but relatively violent fluctuations over the short term. And since we've all got to put food on the table and pay next month's rent in the short term, this wasn't so good for regular folk. For people who were stashing away large sums of money off of which their grandchildren would live idly, the sub 1% long term inflation rate was great. But near 60% (+40/-20) variations in the annual inflation rate were hardly the stuff that made wage-earners smile and love the gold standard. And they didn't.

In short, a government that cared about wage earners and small holders needed to be able to act to create short-term economic stability, even if that was at the expense of some erosion of long term price stability. This isn't so bad a trade, and the proponents of tying money supply to the gold supple ought to be a bit more honest about what the gold standard brought us--lots of volatility, big increases and decreases in prices that tended to cancel each other out in the long run.

If what you long for is more short-term stability, for your dollar to be worth the same this year as last or two years ago, then Gold is not the answer. In fact, it is precisely the opposite of the answer.

Contingency can't be escaped. Gold is not God--He's said as much. The Gold standard does not bring transcendent truth to our financial transactions, it is only mental children who think so, or even hope for it. Financial transactions depend on other people. There is no guarantor for your wealth or goods against any and all contingencies.

Speaking of children, watching the video of the Bernanke/Paul "showdown" really impressed me with how childlike Ron Paul can be. Paul querying (and wearying) Bernanke is just like watching a toddler trying to find the man inside the TV.

Well folks, there is no man in the TV, there is no ultimate truth behind a dollar bill. Just our collective promise and the likely prospect that others will accept it just as you did. Paul thinks that kind of social trust is a Ponzi scheme. Actually it is life as fully cognizant adults live it.

There is no "law" that says only gold is money, just as there is no "law" that says your parents will always be there for you, or that you will always be the center of the universe. Your parents will die, you are one person among billions, and you will have to face and deal with life contingencies one way or another.

But, hopefully not with tiresome delusions like Gold.

The Education Bubble

2011-11-07T10:05:00.001-05:00

http://newssun.suntimes.com/news/8655507-418/analysis-is-student-loan-education-bubble-next.html

The link above is to a relatively thoughtful and thought-provoking article from the AP on the current expansion in higher education & higher ed financing during this financial crisis. Much of this is only to be expected when people lose high-paying manufacturing jobs that aren't coming back and look to tool-up for something comparably paid but quite different in the future. But there are, as the article points out, some signs for a little bit of worry about this new wave of college attendees and the debt they are accruing.

Perhaps the least interesting part of the article is Peter Thiel's fellowships. The $100,000 awards handed out to young people *not* to attend college are great headline fodder, but they're pretty meaningless to the typical high school student. Did someone look at your business plan and hand you 100K? Then you might not need to go to college to succeed. In fact, since college can be rather time consuming, it might be better to concentrate your attention on a big idea that has already inspired people to lay down some big money. Otherwise, you might want to remember the single biggest indicator of class divide in most of the country: a college degree or lack thereof.

And while you are at college you might even, like Mark Zuckerberg, stumble on that big new idea.

Peter Thiel's big complaint with higher education is that it gets in the way of entrepreneurship. But the vast majority of 17-year-olds have little or no entrepreneurship to get in the way of. They are not destined to be 22-year-old Internet millionaires. In fact, even in some dreamed of future of constant innovation, most people are going to work for someone else, doing something that is not insanely great or startlingly innovative. Basing education policy on fostering future Peter Thiels is like basing it on fostering future Powerball winners. The winners are going to be few and far between and your education policy will have little to do with fostering them or with increasing their number.

What education policy *can* do is provide those entrepreneurs with employees with some basic knowledge of how business finance works, or how to market their product, or how to do basic accounting, or how to hire and fire without getting sued, or how to read a report, understand what it is saying and ask some pertinent and challenge questions of its authors, or how to write the code that actually does the insanely great things would-be entrepreneurs dream up.

That's what education and education policy is for: to create competency and to build the groundwork for excellence. Education and education policy do not exist to foster the very, very small percentage of young people who actually have salable ideas. We rely on those folks to fend for themselves, as they have already demonstrated they are able to do by coming up with these ideas in the first place.

Which brings me to a second point about the education bubble: there is one, but not for the reason Thiel thinks. Thiel's line of thinking tends toward the notion that higher education is irrelevant in some "new world" of constant innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. Actually, it isn't a world, it is simply a small class of young people who have opportunities that outweigh the advantages of higher education. But the this kind of millenarian thinking (everything has changed! We need to change our approach to everything to comport with the new reality!) goes on everywhere and seems particularly resonant these days. Actually it was a big contributor to several of our recent asset bubbles. (Who can forget the 1990s?)

But the real reason there may be an education bubble is that, like entrepreneurship, higher education is relevant, but only if you are in a position to take advantage of it. The expansion in college attendance and higher ed financing largely represents a new cohort to the groves of academia. Their parents didn't complete a college degree and, crucially, they are themselves poorly prepared, academically, socially & emotionally, to succeed at college.

As I was suggesting earlier, if Thiel were to succeed and got society to foster a significantly larger cohort of young entrepreneurs to develop their ideas, we would quickly start reaching a population of people who didn't have the ideas, the maturity or the personal traits to succeed as entrepreneurs. Traditional higher ed is already at that point: the expansion we're seeing now is reaching a lot of folks who can't succeed in reaping the true benefits of higher education. Largely because our primary and secondary educational systems have served them so badly, but also because their parents have not prepared them to succeed on their own. At anything.

The financial risks here are not really harrowing, and, who knows, there may be enough good bets in this wave of new college attendees to outweigh those who are wasting their (and our) time & money. But, from what I've seen, I'm dubious. And I say this as someone who, like this new crop, had parents who did not graduate from high school and who had to borrow heavily to attend college.

Vague-iography: Steve Jobs

2011-10-26T15:23:00.002-04:00

I was halfway through Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs when I suddenly went searching through my bookshelf for the book he wrote about Benjamin Franklin. I had read the latter biography when it came out in 2003, and I remembered it fondly. I was trying to figure out why “Steve Jobs,” despite being full of new information about the most compelling businessman of the modern era, was leaving me cold.

Joe Nocera, perhaps, is too kindly a man to suggest the reason for his disappointment. It's not in the author (still the same dispenser of "dutiful, lumbering American news-mag journalese" (Sam Leith) he ever was). It's not the difficulties of contemporary biography itself. It's the subject.

Steve Jobs is quite simply not a man who merits an immediate biography. Not a man whose accomplishments are "enormous" and whose significance must be digested immediately. Not a genius.

What he is is a very successful creator of consumer products, not one of which would never have happened without him. And he is the object of a personality cult. A personality cult that, quite frankly does not speak very well of us. Not because Jobs was particularly undeserving of a personality cult--I think we can confidently say that even taking his many faults into account, he looks quite good next to people like Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin and Castro. No, the reason the Jobs cult makes us look bad is that the cults for people like Mussolini and Stalin were motivated by Utopian dreams--dreams about peace, social unity, the betterment of society at large--which were perverted by and through these cults. (Or, if you will, the Utopian dreams were carried to their natural dystopian conclusions by these opportunists.) The cult for Jobs is an extension of our obsession with toys.

Now it has so long and so often been repeated that Jobs was a "genius"--that he fomented (at least) three different technological revolutions; that he was an "unparalleled innovator"--that by now this sort of statement is taken for granted and it seems perversely contrarian to deny them. But I would point out that proponents of Jobs's genius seldom go into any detail as to what his actual contribution to the technological revolutions was. They are treated more or less as miracles that took place in his presence, and, presumably, due to his presence.

I am going to try be more specific: I am going to take a closer look at the miracles that have led to Jobs's canonization--the personal computing revolution, the GUI-based operating system, Itunes and the Iphone. We'll leave the tablet computer to the side for the moment, as, as far as I can see, it is a technology still in its infancy and its ultimate impact is still pretty unclear.

Before venturing in, some background: I've been using computers since the third grade--1977. I used and programmed Apple IIs and compatibles since shortly after their first introduction. I've used and owned both Apples and Microsoft-based computers since 1990. My early Apple II experience no doubt makes me more of a Woz guy than a Jobs guy.

The Apple II

The Apple II has become emblematic of the personal computing revolution. Deservedly so. This was the first computer that was truly practical for the non-hobbyist to own and use or for schools, where the Apple II became the computer many children first encountered face-to-face, so to speak.

But the Apple II was not the work of Steve Jobs. It was the work of his partner Steve Wozniak. As has been documented many times, Steve Jobs was not a particualrly good electronics or programming man. Wozniak was. And his hacks, innovations and shortcuts are what made the Apple II such a unique machine in the late 1970s. And it was his respect for other people's ability to further hack and adapt the machine that endeared him to many in the early days of home computing. The Apple II had eight expansion slots for cards to be added to expand its capabilities in various ways; the architecture of the machine was open, and software and hardware were freely developed for it. This made the Apple II the beloved of the hacker and open-source communities, which can trace their lineage straight back to Steve Wozniak.

Jobs's contributions to the Apple II itself were small and in some part unwelcome (e.g. Jobs was hostile to cooling fans, so the Apple II had persistent problems with overheating). While Jobs contributions to Apple the business were considerable--Wozniak and the engineers had very little interest in the business side of personal computers. To a large extent the marketing success of the machine is to Jobs's credit. Jobs, for instance, found the first big financial backer for Apple, Mike Markkula. Successfully marketing a revolutionary new product that someone else made is hard work, but not the stuff of miracles.

And Wozniak's innovations would have had considerable impact even if the Apple II was a failure as a product. In other words, *someone* would have used them to try to push computers into the home and school market.

The Macintosh

In 1979, Steve Jobs and Apple engineer Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC, a new technology development center. There they encountered the graphical user interface (GUI)--a way of interacting with the computer that did not involve typing code on a command line. Potentially such an interface could be made into an entirely intuitive experience that would open up computing to a whole new audience.

Jobs was wowed. This, he thought, was the future of computing. And thus was born the Macintosh.

Or so the stroy goes. But the fact is that Jobs was not the first person to think that GUI was the way to go. Many people thought that, including Raskin, who wrote his dissertation on the topic and had been clamoring at Apple meetings for a gui-based "everyman's computer" months before the PARC visit. Steve Jobs did not invent the GUI, nor was he the first to advocate for it even within Apple.

Everyone who thought computers had a future as a consumer product, and with the success of the Apple II, that was most intelligent observers, knew that the GUI was the key to that future. Where Jobs differed from many others (but not Raskin) was in his determination to make that future happen soon.

The resulting products, though, the $10,000 upmarket Lisa and the $2500 mid-market Mac, were failures. The Lisa primarily because businesses wouldn't make the jump to this wholly new kind of computer with very few programs written for it. The Mac becuase the only thing it did well was demonstrate the concept of the GUI. It's measley 128K of memory made it little more than an intriguing toy. And it had not provided for expansion--a motherboard replacement was the only way to expand. The next version of the Mac had 512K, quadrupling the memory and making it all the more obvious that the initial release was an unconscienable compromise. And again, Jobs's hostility to fans had its effect: once agian there were persistent problems with overheating.

Far from being a revolution, the Macintosh was a small player in the PC market and Apple continued to derive most of its sales and revenue from the Apple II series. One wonders how the computer would have turned out if Raskin's initial concept would have carried the day, rather than Jobs's Lisa/Macintosh composite.

The Mac was a big step forward for the GUI. But it was not a revolution. If it were, I'd be typing this on a Mac, and Mac would more than a few percent of the PCs being used worldwide.

The iPod & iTunes

Just for reference: mp3s were already being traded online before the iPod. Mp3 players existed before the iPod. Some fairly good ones (Diamond Rio, for instance). The basic idea goes back to 1996, with the introduction of the Audio Highway Listen Up, which was never produced en masse, but has all the basic design and functionality elements we associate with mp3 players. When introduced, the iPod raised the bar in terms of design, mainly through a partnership with Toshiba, who were pioneering ultra-small hard drives. Competitors quickly caught up. This hardly seems the stuff of secular sainthood.

iTunes has been touted as "the turnkey solution" in the field. But the solution for whom, we might ask? It certainly has not been a turnkey solution for the music industry, which makes too little money off iTunes to staunch the bleeding from illegal downloading. It certainly isn't the solution for knowledgable users, for whom iTunes and Apple's obsessive attempts to control every aspect of consumer experience (and to get a cut of every expenditure) are an encumbrance, not a liberation. Though it IS a trunkey solution for Apple, which has made a great deal of money from it. Here again, from a business perspective, this is perhaps to be admired--like Bill Gates is to be admired for the empire he built with crappy software like Windows. But you don't get sainthood in my book for making a big pile of money.

Design

Aside from making loads of money, the other thing anyone must acknowledge is Jobs's prioritization of design in computers and electronic products.

The first Mac was thoughtfully designed to be "welcoming." Even the Apple II looked distinct from an IBM Selctric typewriter, say. But at the risk of sounding like a philistine, so what? Even if we acknowledge they were somehow more welcoming with their softer corners, of which I'm doubtful, these machines are still ugly. And that welcoming face is completely subjective. A welcoming Apple II did nothing to help someone who didn't know BASIC or basic DOS commands. A welcoming Mac did nothing for a person who couldn't figure out a damned thing to do with it. And "welcoming" wasn't much comfort when the damned thing overheated.

The iMac was Jobs's first foray into truly extravagant design, and it was a pretty big success for Apple--note the "for Apple," meaning for a company that had not had a successful product in years. But mac still represents less than 10% of PC market share even today, after years of success. HP's is more than 18.

I had a couple of these machines around the office until recently, and let me tell you, the jellybean inspired designs do not age well. They are hideous, bulky and awkward. As is the lamp iMac of a few years later, though later flatscreen iMacs at least do not offend.

The basic concept that Jobs is pushing is the computer as "appliance". But the problem is that the computer is not essentially an appliance--the level of its functionality is microscopic (electrons getting shuttled here and there), so it's human scale form can never match its function, and every gesture toward form meets function is very much recognizable as annoyingly dated whimsy after a few weeks.

The all-in-one flatscreen iMacs finally overcome this problem though by eliminating the box rather than pointlessly trying to aestheticize it. This minimalism, in the hands of Jobs and the eyes of his beholders, becomes an aesthetic in itself. But the resulting computers are pretty consistently mediocre in terms of performance. Good enough for casual users. Not so good for anything requiring heavy lifting.

The flair for design may be better applied to electronic devices such as phones and mp3 players. But if these designs are so sublime, one wonders, why do they have to change every 18 months of so? Are these vaunted designs any more important than the curvaceous fenders on a 1977 Matador? and is a "passion" for one any less silly than a passion for the other.

And it is here that we find the real heart of Jobs's insight: how to play into our fetishism for shiny new objects, sleek, minimalistic, but with significant changes in motif . . . a change from say a look suggesting obsidian to a look more suggestive of a brushed metal, futuristic, industrial-aesthetic contrivance, then perhaps back to the computer meets comestible look. the constant changes fuel sales from novelty addicted clients, for whom these toys provide some semblance of greater meaning--some promise of a future where technology will somehow intervene to solve all our personal problems. And these toys have to look magical, even if only temporarily, in order to support the heavy, if unacknowledged, symbolism.

Reading too much in? How else to explain the irrational vehemence of the Apple acolyte? The I-shrines dedicated to a man an admitted asshole who, truly, did very little to become a saint and very little if anything of a truly revolutionary nature? Why else does anyone care so much? Why else do writers grasp after the grandiose but insistently non-specific when they lionize him?

Our Utopia has changed from being a place to being a kind of social order to, finally, being a magical item. Perhaps this is a utopianism without the dangers of Hitler or Stalin, but it also without the promise of the Enlightenment or, closer to home, the civil rights movement. Sad to see, really.

The New Romans

2010-10-03T13:56:00.004-04:00

Thomas Friedman has an editorial in today's New York Times about the decline of the two-party system and the possible rise of a new third party in the next round of presidential elections. A third party that would say

“These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”

This refers back to a passage he quotes from Lewis Mumford:

“Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”

There are a number of big problems with Friedman's analysis of our situation. For one thing it comes from Thomas Friedman who is perhaps second only to Bill Kristol in being consistently wrong about things (think Enron & Global Crossing, web stocks, the Iraq War . . .).

Second, this analysis comes out of more time spent by Friedman hanging out in Silicon Valley. One fundamental mistake Friedman makes is consistently misreading the nation's problems with Washington as being the same as those of Silicon Valley executives. Actually, the two sets of problems are quite different. Whatever they might say, the business people just want government to work: they want it to keep the people quiescent, to see to the education of kids and the protection of property rights, and to keep the business environment relatively stable.

They don't want anything revolutionary or anything that will open the doors to sweeping changes. What business wants is a return to the bipartisan consensus building that we've been running on for more than 60 years.

Now, IF a third party were to emerge out of the entrepreneurial/ established high-tech business interests that have been picking up Friedman's bar tab lately, they would only accuse the two established parties of lying as part of an elaborate sham to establish a new party that would then proceed to go straight back to business as usual.

Trouble is, that's precisely what Obama tried to do: sell himself as a change agent and then just run things more or less as they've always been run. What went wrong? Well, the economy, stupid, for one thing. People are discontent and scared and looking for reasons why. Another is the brinkmanship the Republican party has now embraced--the willingness--eagerness--to make the entire country fail if that failure is blamed on the other side. A third is the now far more active fecklessness and stupidity of the American electorate--who elect a man on a platform of change, quail at any large changes that might be proposed and then blame that man for not effecting change. This is a pathological and deeply irresponsible electorate. The ungovernable-ness that grips California--the inability to support either stasis or change, let alone negotiate a dilemma--now grips the country as a whole.

We ARE the new Romans, only we aren't the Romans of AD 200 or so, losing our "inner go" to fend off those barbarians and keep rolling back the frontier. We are more like the Romans of a few hundred years earlier who lost their their "inner go" to make tough decisions for themselves, or even to put on the semblance of doing so. We are the Romans on the road to civil war.

This is not a problem that will be solved by a presidential candidate from a new party. The crisis we averted a year or so ago was, indeed, caused by an elite of reckless high-stakes gamblers. But in the end, that elite showed they could pull their fat from the fire in the last instance. This sort of problem might perhaps be better addressed by a new party.

But our crisis now is different. Our problem is that the populace has gotten extremely comfortable with a life of economic and political parasitism and they really have no comprehension whatsoever of the system they've been living off of. They only comprehend that they always want to collect winnings at the tables, to enjoy an always growing economy and to celebrate military victories won by someone else's children . . . and they want to feel morally righteous doing so.

This is not a crisis that calls for truth, this is a crisis that calls for better lies. And I don't think Thomas Friedman or Silicon Valley has got them.

Slow going . . .

2010-09-26T10:19:00.002-04:00

with Pascal Boyer.

Just a brief note of explanation.

I've found Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained to be pretty heavy going. It's good in that it tends to deal pretty systematically with a range of different approached to each of the central questions about religion it treats, but I always get the feeling--the same feeling I got reading Pinker's Blank Slate--that many of the arguments get presented in such a way as they are nothing but epiphenomena of Boyer's own argument.

As in Pinker, there is a veneer of reasonableness and even-handedness that is really disingenuous. So I don't get very far reading before I'm diverted into a) dealing with the actual arguments; b) filling out some of the detail Boyer seems to me to neglect and c) noting the rhetorical strategies he uses to cover up his elisions.

Lastly, I get the feeling that over the course of the book he might return to some topics to treat them in greater detail, so I'm reluctant to attack something I find on page 50 that he addresses on page 150. So, this will probably have to wait to I get all the way through . . .

Dear America: Grow the F**k Up!

2010-09-23T09:25:00.009-04:00

an open letter

Dear America:

Before coming to the real object of this letter, I'd like to reassure you that I am not a "hater." I don't chortle when I read articles about how fat you are, and I don't smile in self-satisfaction when I read that you don't know which continent Somalia is in, or that you think Arafat is an even worse version of trans-fat.

I've always been happy to live in your land of freedom, convinced that a working-class scholarship boy probably could hope for no better chances at life than I've had here. And I've always found foreign affectations and foibles to be even more annoying than yours. So rest assured, I have your best interests at heart, and I always try to think the best of you.

These past few months have been a challenge, though. A couple of years ago you surprised a lot of people by electing a black President, but not me: I knew the open-mindedness you were capable of. But apparently I had forgotten about the fecklessness, cowardice and paranoia that lurked beneath that veneer of open-handed reasonableness. I had forgotten that in spite of your 234 years, you still possess the intellectual and emotional maturity of your average nine-year-old.

Now, granted, things have been tough, and tough times can bring out a cranky streak in the best of us. But watching Velma Hart, a representative, apparently, of your deepest held feelings and thoughts, wail and complain to the President the other day really drove home to me that, you, America, are unfit to rule yourself.

"I've been told that I voted for a man who said he's going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I'm one of those people, and I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting. I don't feel it yet. . . . I'm exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now."

In short, you are still waiting for a parent, or a superhero or God to do the things that only you can do and, while he or she is at it, to do a bunch of things that no one can do. While you just go on doing whatever it is you do.

Well, guess what America? It doesn't work that way. Change isn't made by electing someone whose slogan is change. No elected representative is going to Washington waving a magic wand to make everything better while you watch re-runs on television or post inane observations on Facebook (or write blogs, for that matter). Change comes through work and cost to yourself.

No elected representative has a time machine to undo the dumbass things you and your poorly supervised representatives have done in the past. So, no you haven't just up and left Iraq and Afghanistan, becuase having already invaded and overthrown the governments there you have a moral responsibility to see the transition through. And no, you don't get your money back because you belated think adventurous wars aren't such a good idea. And no, you don't get the money back from the huge deficits run up from the last administration you elected because now you've decided that maybe deficits are a thing to worry about. And yes, you did still have a huge, expensive, nearly cataclysmic economic crisis just two years ago. And, yes, you'll be paying the price for the idiocy of the last ten years or so for some time to come.

The "change" that needs to happen is a change is a change in YOU, America. YOU have to stop thinking that Obama or Palin or tinkerbell is going to save you and make every little thing alright. It ain't going to happen. And you have to stop thinking that the political managers you install are going to work in your interests when you a) have no real conception of what those are; b) you don't do much at all to supervise the activities of these managers; and c) you know so little about what these managers do.

"I am waiting" is frankly a pathetic attitude to take when you are supposedly in charge of yourself. You are waiting for what? The waving the magic wand option being out, as discussed above, what economic tradeoffs look wise to you right now? Oh, you didn't know low taxes came at a cost? Or that you might have to choose between two unpleasant options like deficits or stagnation? Don't like the War in Afghanistan? Well are you willing to take responsibility for what happens when you leave? No, of course you aren't. Don't like torture and the extra-legal detention in Guantanamo? Well, are you willing to live with the consequences of closing the place? Willing to support a prison on the mainland? And trials on the mainland? No, I thought not.

America, you have too long been an absentee landlord in Washington, blissfully ignorant of what's going on there, and swooping in occasionally to kick out a few obvious bad tenants and a few others more-or-less at random. Of course things don't go well with you. In fact, you've gotten way better service than you've deserved over the years. Luckily, the good old boys and girls DO actually seem to feel a bit of paternalistic affection for you in spite of your fecklessness.

But, as I said, tough times do bring out the crankiness in us. America, it is time to grow the fuck up or shut the fuck up. Let Velma know what you decide.

Stone's Fall 2

2010-09-09T07:17:00.002-04:00

A disappointing novel, and not at all the "return to form" touted by the publisher. Stone's Fall is a sloppy, half-hearted and poorly planned novel with, really, little point. As adventure it is far too long and far too slow; as an intellectual mystery in the tradition of Name of the Rose, it has little to say of an intellectually stimulating nature.

The first three hundred pages of Stone's Fall consists of slowly developing setup with an unappealing character who has no role (aside from afterthought) in the last 500 pages of the novel. Those last 500 pages have somewhat more in the way of winning characters and plot interest, but there really doesn't seem to be much point to it all. The seeming promise that we'll gain some insight into the "art" behind capital is never delivered on and we're left with a tale of superhuman manipulators, which is frankly far less interesting than a tale of plain old human manipulators.

Reading Stone's Fall, two Neils were strongly called to mind, neither of whom spells it that way. A very long novel that promises to show us something about the workings of international capital can't help but call Neal Stephenson to mind, who explored what he feels are the roots of the modern world system in his Baroque Cycle a few years back.

The comparison in some ways is flattering to Pears--Pears is a far better literary craftsman than Stephenson--he can create believable characters and write good dialog and move a story along without being too obvious with his stagecraft, all of which Stephenson has great problems with in his Baroque Cycle. But one thing that Stephenson has that Pears' novel sorely lacks is a sense of brio and intellectual insight.

The other Neil this novel brought to mind is Niall Ferguson, who has been much concerned in his historical writing with this period and with the same developments which set the stage for this novel--the formation of international capital , imperialist power struggle, and WWI, which is only on the horizon of Stone's Fall, but importantly so.

But with all these great elements at play, about which Ferguson is just full of interesting interpretations, Pears manages nothing much, except perhaps to say that capitalism is about buying cheap and selling dear, and that, ultimately, someone has to bear the burden of being on the wrong side of those deals. And even this delivered weakly.

Too bad really.

Back to Boyer

2010-09-07T02:37:00.004-04:00

For a long time, people used to think that the brain was a rather simple organ. Apart from the bits that control the body machinery, there seemed to be a vast empty space in the young child's mind destined to be filled with whatever education, culture and personal experience provided. This view of the mind was never too plausible, since after all the liver and the gut are much more complex than that. But we did not know much about the way minds develop, so there were no facts to get in the way of this fantasy of a "blank slate" where experience could leave its imprint. The mind was like those vast expanses of unexplored Africa that old maps used to fill with palm trees and crocodiles. Now we know more about minds. We do not know everything, but one fact is clear: the more we discover about how minds work, the less we believe in this notion of a blank slate. Every further discovery in cognitive science makes it less plausible as an explanation. (3)

Back to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained . . . then above passage from quite early on in the book.

This a pretty bad start on things. For one thing, Boyer is immediately sallying forth into an area that really doesn't have much to do with his topic. The history of attitudes toward human nature is just not fundamental to the topic of what religion is. He might just start by saying something like "The explanations put forward in this book assume that the human brain is an evolved entity, with certain inherent tendencies which . . ."

Instead we get the Blank Slate straw man. Why straw man? Because the man who proposed the idea, back in 1690, didn't think human beings had no inherent nature. he thought they had no inherent ideas. Durkheim, another supposed "blank slate" proponent specifically rejects the idea. And of course, before 1690, Western thought was dominated by precisely the opposite sorts of notions--that certain ideas were innate, that man had a fallen nature from birth, etc., etc.

So for a long time, since the beginning of the time we began thinking about what the nature of our minds or souls or brains was, the question has been dominated by the notion that in has a fairly specific nature, not by the fantasy of a "blank slate." In fact, this line of inquiry has been pretty heavily distorted by interested assertions as to what that specific nature is.

What Boyer really means to say here is that, for a few decades, the idea has been prevalent in anthropological circles that the contents of our brains are determined by our cultures, not by any inherent characteristics and that he and his book are part of the reaction against that prevalent notion.

There is nothing world-historically innovative in the idea that our brains have an inherent nature. This is the dominant line of thinking on this matter generally. It always has been.

The fantasy of a blank slate is today far less common that the fantasy of its absolute dominance in recent thought.

So why begin the book with the idea of some "Blank Slate" demon at large in the intellectual streets? Because what we are about to read will only impress when set against a backdrop of the most abject ignorance? ("Well, this is all pretty commonplace, but at least it is better than what those veritable flat-earthers think over there . . .)

Or maybe it's just a declaration of allegiance with the contemporary forces of expansionist science? Or maybe its just a failure of perspective from someone who has spent too much time in academic infighting. Or too much time in France.

I think the answer is probably one of the latter options, but nevertheless, it's a bad start to a book that as least pretends at a broad and objective attempt to explain religion.

The Military and the President

2010-08-30T08:41:00.003-04:00

New York Times ran a fairly long analysis piece by Peter Baker on the relationship between Obama and the military:

While Mr. Obama took three sometimes maddening months to decide to send more forces to Afghanistan, other decisions as commander in chief have come with dizzying speed, far less study and little public attention.
He is the first president in four decades with a shooting war already raging the day he took office — two, in fact, plus subsidiaries — and his education as a commander in chief with no experience in uniform has been a steep learning curve. He has learned how to salute. He has surfed the Internet at night to look into the toll on troops. He has faced young soldiers maimed after carrying out his orders. And he is trying to manage a tense relationship with the military.

Now, my first thought here is "Judy Miller" or "reporter depending far too much on interested sources." For one thing, the entire article reflects an attitude, one clearly wholly absorbed by our author, that military decisions are technical decisions, not political ones. This is clearly false, and was shown to be so in Vietnam--we don't win wars when we don't have the political will to fight them. The military knew this well--that's why the military leadership was always so reluctant to have us commit to foreign wars: they wanted to make sure there was truly a will to ride the thing out to its end.

But it's amazing how quickly things change after 8 years of fighting. The people in charge in the military now seem take continual war as a given, the only question is how to conduct it. Well guess what? That's not the only question, and it's the President's job to see to it that the other questions get addressed. Even if the wait might be "agonizing" for you. We won't be fighting in Afghanistan forever, and we're going to leave whether we "win" or not. Military leaders ought to wrap their minds around that reality.

My second thought on reading this piece was the seemingly eternal nature of it. Didn't the military also have its problems with Bush? And Clinton? And Carter? And Nixon?

It would seem to me that the problematic side of this relationship is the military side--they can't quite seem to come to grips with the idea that they serve a democracy, that military considerations are secondary to the interests of the nation as a whole as interpreted by its political leaders. The problem here ISN'T that Barack Obama didn't have a firm grasp on military protocol when he was elected (who did? who cares?). The problem is our military has gotten a bit big for its britches. They seem to have forgotten that they exist to carry out politically determined policy. And that the nation doesn't exist to support them.

Perhaps it's time to draw back and restructure the military a bit (read: officer purge) and start taking a look at just how self-interested and self-serving the Pentagon has become.

Detour into Pears

2010-08-28T17:09:00.003-04:00

Sorry, I've been distracted from Pascal Boyer by a couple of other books, including Iain Pears' new one Stone's Fall.

I'm only 200 pages in (it's 800 or so, I think), but I can't remember a book that has so much reminded me of John Fowles' Magus, what with the sexual tension, the unlikeable narrator and the (seemingly) deep and complicated plot which blows our hapless hero through the novel.

Somehow, Pears doesn't seem to be able to pull it off quite as well, though. Fowles, perhaps, has an advantage in his era: there was a pretty certain meta-narrative (liberation!) to the 60s, one that he could write with and against as it pleased him. Pears doesn't really have anything like a stable matrix to write against.

And that sort of historical meta-narrative does seem to be a big concern for Pears (see Dream of Scipio, which by my reading is a fairly serious consideration of what it means to live in a decaying culture).

Also, I'm reading a advance review copy, so there are a number of mistakes and omissions that are bothersome to me. One thing that is amusing is the letter to reviewers from one of the publishers--this novel represents a "return to form" for Pears--the form of the Instance of the Fingerpost. And it is indeed a literal return to that semi-postmodern, genre-influenced door-stopper form, but the heavy implication is that we should have been very disappointed in Pears work between Fingerpost and Stone. I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss Scipio or The Portrait, both worthy reads, imo, if quite different from Fingerpost.

One fault of the novel can't be blamed on the lack of final editing: important plot elements that drop from the sky--perhaps all will be made clear though farther along . . .

Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained

2010-08-18T09:44:00.003-04:00

Just started reading this last night. I've never thoroughly read it before, just spent some time with it at the library and I thought I'd note here some of my responses as I read along.

A few notes before I set out:

1. This book tries to lay out many serious lines of argument regarding religion, assess them, and use them as seems fit. So, as I read along in the text I will no doubt be making caveats that Boyer himself makes later on in the book. So reading my notes on the book will require a certain amount of charity--both for me--because I just haven't gotten to that part of the book yet--and for Boyer--because I just haven't gotten to that part of the book yet.

So when I complain about a passage in Religion Explained, that doesn't mean that Boyer doesn't see the same point or that there is necessarily a huge gap between my understanding of religion and his. I'm more or less taking this book as a good launching place for intelligent discussion of where religion may have come from.

2. This is a pretty old book--copyright 2001--so there's no doubt more good data out there than this book reflects.

3. Boyer uses the concept of memes and I hope to line out some of the weaknesses of memes even as a heuristic device here. But I am decidedly biased against memes.

Anyhow, I hope to get a few passages from the book posted here shortly with a bit of critical analysis.

Naomi Klein

2010-01-21T22:54:00.003-05:00

I don't know Naomi Klein's writings very well. I know her name (her brand?) and I saw her in the Copenhagen video I wrote about earlier, but I haven't really spent too much time with her.
Reading the excerpt of her 10th Anniversary edition of No Logo, I was tempted to write that the age of branding has a suitable commentator: a shallow one.
I suppose if you write the anti-branding book, you have to take branding seriously, but Klein really takes the branding gurus at their word a bit too much. the fact is that branding, like many of the other hot management trends of the last 50 years or so, is a pretty nebulous phenomenon.
If by branding we mean products whose cache far exceeds their material function (Nike, Starbucks) . . . well that's been with us for a long time. A very long time. In fact, it is one of the things that has been complained about since the birth of consumer culture and was observed by writers of pastoral condemnations of frivolous, rich, urban sophisticates thousands of years ago. The Marxist writer Baudrillard made this phenomenon a particular focus of his work in the 1960s and 1970s.

The rise of the branding gurus in the past 10 years gave us a new vocabulary for talking about this phenomenon. But those gurus didn't invent branding or even change it all that much.

George W. Bush was not an unprecedented triumph of branding over reality (Benjamin Harrison, anyone?). And while the Obama administration may be in more than one way unprecedented, I think the phenomenon is a bit more complex than it's ad campaigns.

In a way, Klein seems to recognize this, and brings in another phenomenon, outsourcing, that she hopes may be a bit more definitive of our time. In a way, maybe. Outsourcing is one the more dramatic ways the powerful display to us a quality that they now have in spades--moreso than ever before--flexibility.

Klein tries to figure outsourcing as a outgrowth of branding: As branding presents a huge front for what is usually a modest product, outsourcing "hollows out" formerly grand institutions--government, "big" business--even as their facades present the same big, reassuring facade to the public. But outsourcing isn't primarily about visionary business strategy, or a "light" military (though Rumsfeld, may have been dumb enough ton have drunk the new age koolaid). Outsourcing is about always having options. If your union workforce is expensive and recalcitrant, having a factory in China is a great stick to hold in negotiations with them: you can credibly threaten to move more or all operations there. If your army is led by officers with a different notion of America's role in the world, being able to do select tasks (kidnap & torture?) with Blackwater functionaries--usually ex-soldiers themselves--can be convenient both from a deniability standpoint and as a lever against reluctant military leaders.

But this isn't new. The forces of British colonialism were often employees of private companies like the East India Company. And the whole world of party-affiliated (rather than state-affiliated institutions making decisions and enacting them was a common characteristic of communist and fascist regimes.

While the rise of government outsourcing and quasi-governmental groups to do the outsourcing IS distressing, I doubt it has anything to do with more recent events in the world of branding.

One of Klein's big problems, a problem one often sees among theorists on the left, is that she takes the "conspiracists" at their word--she actually believes the branding gurus when they say they've discovered the new philosophers stone, when in truth this is just another line of market-speak, another management & business philosophy "revolution" which only serves to make out overpopulated management & administrative sector feel likes it has some kind of purpose.

The dirty secret is not that business has found some new way of usurping our decision-making powers from the grocery store to the ballot box. The dirty secret is that we willingly--happily-- surrender that power, and that we are surrendering it to a bunch of empty suits, people every bit as feckless, hapless and fraudulent as the "citizens" who abdicate the power to them.

Copehagen: Group therapy

2009-12-17T07:17:00.003-05:00

Copenhagen police tackle 4,000-strong climate protest
On a day when NGOs were given limited access to the Copenhagen summit, protesters marched on the Bella centre to reclaim the climate debate back to the people most affected

Or so says the headline from the guardian to a video feature on the Copenhagen protests. But what the hell does that mean, "reclaiming the climate debate?" Is there any point at all to these protests? Do we want these people "reclaiming the debate?"

I heard a radio report on BBC the other day and the protesters were talking about what they were doing as if it were an activists convention--oh, it was so nice to reconnect with activists from around the world. It's all so heartwarming, blah blah blah. Street protest as a form of therapy? Is that what this is?

10 years from Seattle . . .

2009-11-28T09:49:00.004-05:00

I think that ten years from now, the thing that's going to be written about Seattle, is not what tear gas bomb went off on what street corner, but that the WTO in 1999 was the first of a global citizens movement for a democratic global economy (This is What Democracy Looks Like). Ten years ago tomorrow, diverse activist groups appeared in Seattle to protest perceived globalization/corporatization exemplified by the World Trade Organization. (Wiki) Some more anniversary stuff from KPLU in Seattle, Real Change, and maybe the Teabaggers. Previously: One year after.

This via twoleftfeet at metafilter . . .

It's interesting. Ten Years On, this is not what democracy looks like. Thank goodness. For one thing that's just impossibly corny. And, more seriously, it's a seriously skewed vision of what democracy should be. The protesters were, essentially protesting on behalf of rule by a young, self-righteous minority. The messiness of actual democracy holds little interest for folks who are so in love with the romantic gesture.

On the other hand, this is probably a great time (when economic activity has slowed somewhat and there isn't so much money immediately at stake) to revisit the economic issues surrounding globalization. Not the issues so often flogged by the kids on the street, but some of the basic structural issues of bringing dozens of heterogenous nations under one market.

The last ten years have seen some remarkable strides taken by significant portions of the world population, but there are some significant transition problems in the global economy. But there have been problems as well: the further de-industrialization of America; the export of high-paying service and technical jobs to lower-wage markets, etc.

Americans sometimes view this situation as their being displaced by sadly exploited workers from overseas . . . but as many American workers should be aware by now, the only thing worse than being an exploited worker is being an un-exploited worker. The "exploited" workers of China and Malaysia, while not enjoying a western lifestyle, are exercising what they perceive to be a much better option than the alternative (life in a village) . . . and even if their conditions were ameliorated, labor-costs would still be quite low compared to the US. The problem isn't the exploitation, it's the radical difference in development between the US and other nations.

Globalization theory assumes that by opening up markets, allowing people to purchase what they want at what price they can negotiate and letting manufacturers move to the places they can best compete, the global economy as a whole will optimize over time, with each participant assuming the role best suited to it, as determined by geographic factors, character of the people, the regulatory climate, what have you. Over time this would result in an evening out of the overall economic landscape: ideally there would not be such a huge disparity between rich & poor nations in a globalized economy.

This process takes time, though, and meanwhile we have "race to the bottom" situations developing across the globe--in areas like waste disposal, worker rights, regulation, taxation and more, developing countries are competing to be the most lax. But living standards are beginning to improve in some of the largest developing nations, and hopefully new forms of domestic political pressure will eventually condition the drive for cheap. But what to do meanwhile?

And even success may have its dangers: an optimizing world economy may be very bad news for the country that has been reaping the benefits of the sub-optimal economy for so long: the United States. As economic conditions do begin to even out, the US is not going to be such an exceptional country anymore. It may be a bigger adjustment for us than we anticipate. In fact the belligerence of the Bush administration may be just a foretaste of America's response to fades back into the pack economically.

It would be great to see globalization being discussed 10 years on, rather watching a bunch of kids use it as the occasion for tiresome street theater. I am skeptical that we have it in us to actually talk about an issue that activists groups have made as divisive as possible*, but who knows?

Race and the tea-baggers

2009-09-19T11:11:00.003-04:00

David Brooks

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it’s so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government “tea party” protesters.They were carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, “End the Fed” placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions.Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.

I read this in the New York Times the other day, and as I often am with David Brooks I was both somewhat in agreement and dismayed by the oversimplification.

But race is an issue that everyone oversimplifies quite a bit, it seems. Some of what Brooks is saying is true: there is a populist/educated divide in America. A lot of other things than race play into it--education, obviously, but also the de-industrialization of the country, insane pay for folks whose contributions are questionable, the panoply of social changes we've seen since the 1960s, etc., etc. In fact, I come from a place where this conflict was obvious every day of the week--my family was working class, a lot of my relatives did poorly in school and worked manual labor positions. But my father was a very intelligent man and a voracious autodidact. The contrast and conflict between the values and expectations of my father and those of many of the people around us was one of the central experiences of my childhood.

There's a lot that goes into the frustration that these folks feel, but to say that race doesn't play a role is absolutely wrong.

Populism itself has a pretty ugly history when it comes to race (the modern Ku Klux Klan was part of a populist rising in the early part of the twentieth century). While, yes, the current generation of populist rabble aren't Ku Klux Klanners, and do have far more comfort with blacks than their grandparents may have had, the fact that Obama is black is without question one of the things that makes the country seem "not theirs anymore."

Every single one of their issues either a) is delusional or b) was also true under Bush. Can it be a coincidence that the real engine beneath the populist rising is immigration, and if you scratch the surface there you find that the fear is not just that immigrant will pull their wages down or displace them, but pure xenophobia.

And that xenophobia, even when it is completely in its "fear of sophisticates" (and it isn't for most of these people) mode is only a small step away from "fear of anyone not white and Middle American."

These people are not too stupid to know the difference between, say, Al Qaida and Iraq. The problem is they want theri conflicts to be ethnic issues. Ethnic conflict is easy to resolve: kill the other. And that, in short, is what is behind all the threatening posturing at these demos.

Appreciation of rap and ability to mingle with blacks notwithstanding, these folks are intense xenophobes, and where that xeno starts is a fluid line. And it certainly begins before we get to an articulate black man leading the country.

Soccer: the American Exception

2009-06-29T22:06:00.003-04:00

The New York Times doesn't have much of a sports section. When I was living in Jersey, I always took tow papers: one for the sports and the New York Times for everything else.

But though the section lacks comprehensiveness, what is in there is generally OK, particularly for sports you don't follow avidly (for me everything but baseball).

William Rhoden's article on the American loss to Brazil in the Confederations Cup title game was therefore rather surprising in its seeming laziness and ignorance. Here's the opener:

Another loss on a major stage: Brazil 3, United States 2.
This is the epitaph in the wake of a heartbreaking loss in Sunday’s Confederations Cup championship game.
Too harsh? Perhaps, considering the United States was facing a great Brazilian team. On the other hand, there must come a point in the discussion of soccer in the United States when the training wheels must be removed. Either this is youth soccer, in which the goal is to let everyone play, or this is the big time, in which second or third place is no longer acceptable.
There was so much momentum heading into Sunday’s game, so much enthusiasm after the United States’ stunning victory over Spain on Wednesday.

"Either this is youth soccer, in which the goal is to let everyone play, or this is the big time, in which second or third place is no longer acceptable?" This is a professional sports writer? Nothing matters but the win?: Then please stop filling inches with tiresome descriptions and analysis--resign even. Anyone can print the results if that's all that matters.

Championship or ignomity is the attitude of someone who ONLY understands the result. An attitude born of ignorance. And if Rhoden is ignorant of soccer, he ought to stop writing about it.

Mind you, I don't follow soccer: I've played quite a bit; I can watch a game and tell what's going on and who is playing well; but I don't know who the current stars are or the state of the game in general.

And no doubt about it, being unable to hold down a 2-0 lead agains Brazil is a disappointment. But those guys are very very good. And Spain, whom the US did beat, is very very good. And the US? Well up until last week you couldn't have gotten most soccer fans around the world to say more than we were "respectable." As in: a team not to be taken lightly, but to be mindfully and handily beaten.

Now, fans around the world are thinking again. That represents success. A big one.

Still, instead of talking about a great triumph, we’re back to talking about what United States soccer needs to break through at home.

Regardless of Sunday’s outcome, the sport faces two major challenges in the United States. The first is how to continue to attract great athletes. . .

American soccer’s struggle to attract great talent is baffling because there are so many young people looking for something to do. The United States is one of the most powerful nations, one with phenomenal human resources.

The sprawling soccer federations reflect the nation: some have a lot, some have very little. The leadership must find the will — and a way — to redistribute resources. This is crucial for the long-term goal of having a great national team, year in and year out.

The more difficult challenge is to cultivate a broader consumer appetite for soccer in the United States. Debates continue about changing the nature of the sport to fit the American mind-set.

Please, no.

The fate of soccer in the United States is no more in the hands of the current national team than it was in the hands of the great US women's teams of the past (big wins: no change in the niche status of soccer) or the fate of hockey was in the hands of the 1980 gold medal team (big wins: hockey remains a second tier sport).

The fate of soccer in the US is simply not the story of a soccer match, unless you are ignorant and unappreciative of the sport as played on the field. The story of last week is: the US team has a lot more potential than it's been given credit for; but it still has a long way to go before it'll be able to win during crunch time in the world cup.

Mr. Rhoden, if you'd like to write yet another "fate of soccer" article in place of writing about the actual game of soccer as played on the field, please keep those last words of your article ready for your assignment editor, words that will reflect the desires the paper's readership: "Please, no."

Back to Dutton

2009-05-03T09:42:00.002-04:00

Denis Dutton's new book, The Art Instinct, is an interesting read from my standpoint. Dutton is pretty well-read, and he loves literature and art, so his book doesn't display the pure ignorance some efforts in this direction have suffered under (EO Wilson's, for instance).

Dutton is not a philistine, as Gould said most scientists were.

However, he is also no scientist.

As I read his book, I am struck by how badly conceived some of the science is. For instance in his passages about adaptionism, he SAYS it is silly to equate adaptiveness with human value:

By insisting that "some of the activities we consider most profound are non-adaptive by-products," Pinker is trying to steer clear of any hint of hyper-adaptionism: "it is wrong to invent functions for activities that lack [adaptive] design merely because we want to ennoble them with the imprimatur of biological adaptiveness.

This from a sympathetic source of whom he ought to be heedful. In fact I wonder if this bit wasn't added after Pinker or some other kind soul pointed out the pervasive tendency of the book to seek to do just what Pinker warns against . . .

But this analysis [that female orgasm is a side effect, not an adaptation] implies, in my opinion, a paltry, limited view of sexual pleasure. . . . Only an impoverished view of erotic sex could grant adaptiveness exclusively to male orgasm and suggest that everything else that happens in sex, from flirting to foreplay to affectionate aftermath, is only an incidental accompaniment, an extraneous by-product . . .

Just to be clear--as far as I know, this matter is still subject to dispute, and I certainly have no dog in the fight: we just don't know which elements of our sexuality and sexual practices are adaptive in the biological sense.

And as someone judging the importance of different aspects of human activity, and as a sexual being myself, I don't care what may or may not be adaptive, and neither should Dutton. But he sure seems to care.

Adaptiveness does not confer human importance as Dutton implies above. Adaptiveness tells a story about how something came about NOT what good it may or may not be for us. The etiology of female orgasm may be as a side effect of neural channels whose presence was selected for in males but present in females only out of structural necessity. But this doesn't change the fact that, in later practice, female orgasm can be quite important, even centrally important, in a society where women have power and choices. That doesn't alter the etiology of female orgasm, however.

The reason that Dutton so flagrantly defies Pinker's sound advice here is that the possibility that something like female orgasm may be a "side-effect" suggests the possibility that the arts may be, and that the proper frame of reference for talking about the importance of things like the arts and female orgasm may not be the Pleistocene--the semi-mythical ur-environment which serves to radically simplify evolutionary psychological speculation.

If, say, female orgasm or art are important for a whole load of reasons having to do with biology, yes, but also social structure, cultural tradition, the changing role of women, etc. etc. then Dutton can't use his origin stories to cut off and limit discussion of the nature art and female orgasm.

So he plays a rather interesting rhetorical game of three card monte--certainly sex and art are FAR too rich and important elements of human experience to be mere side effects, certainly they are adaptations. And because they are adaptations, I can use my origin stories to privilege a particular way of looking at these things (art as, first and foremost, palate reaction; sex as we know it as, first and foremost, procreational).

The second of these rhetorical moves is less important than the first--it is only an example, and I doubt if Dutton really cares about legitimizing certain kinds of sex, but he certainly has an interest in legitimizing pre-modernist standards in art.

Which is fine, as far as I am concerned--it is a viable position to take. But trying to short-circuit the discussion through a pseudo-scientific origin story of how art came about is not just fine. Particularly when Dutton seems so little concerned with and/or incapable of upholding the argumentative standards of the science he is attempting to employ.

Art, however it came about--and nothing in Dutton's book persuades me that we know--is now a huge part of how we deal with each other, identify each other and group ourselves in society. Whether or not art is "primarily social," the social aspect of art is a significant part of the role it plays, and cannot be ignored, even if it does make life simpler for critics.

Carroll on Gould

2009-05-02T16:14:00.003-04:00

Anyone who has read much of this blog knows where my sympathies lie in the "Science Wars." I don't hate Richard Dawkins, but I find a few of his hobby horses to be annoying and/or dangerously misleading. And I pretty much despise the whole sociobiological project to colonize the social sciences and the humanities, be it by means of memes or by means of consillance, the whole project is something I admit is theoretically possible--like it is possible that human development was crucially influence by alien intervention--but almost always silly in practice. Why? Because the starting off point is always taking as granted a whole bunch of far from settled science on human development.

Recently, I've been commenting on a (fairly good) review of Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct over at Cognition and Culture and I've gotten into something of a dust up over (red flag!) Stephen Gould with Joseph Carroll, who has been a leading figure in the Literary Darwinism movement along with the biologist David Sloan Wilson and the Englsih PhD Jonathan Gottschall.

My own take is pretty much what it was--what is good in Dutton's book could have been written without the constant reference to our Pleistocene ancestors, and what requires them is highly doubtful.

Gould's name got dragged into this because Dutton rather dully and unneccessarily attacks him in his book. Gould the horrible, oppressive monster gets a lot of play in certain circles. Everyone else has opinions, Gould issues fiats from an undisclosed location to end free speech and scientific inquiry as we know it. Lucky for us dozens upon dozens of heroes are willing to stand up to this threat, disagree with Gould and tiresomely crow about how daring they are. Sometimes I wonder if Gould has anything to do with the Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy.

Anyhow, Gould's name arose, and immediately became the focus of dispute.

Hmm, let's see, theorists like Maynard Smith, E.O. Wilson, Conway Morris, and David Hull are won't to sling "bullshit." And critics who cite their opinion of Gould are likely to be "hotheads." My irony bone tingles.Panksepp and Panksepp are good and serious critics of orthodox or "narrow-school" evolutionary psychology. Other critics who fall into that category would include Kim Sterelny, Richerson and Boyd, David Sloan Wilson, Steven Mithen, Paul Griffiths, and Nicholas Wade. All of these commentators, like the critics of Gould previously mentioned, are different from Gould in that they are not intellectual charlatans. They are honest, straightforward thinkers. They aim to make sense, not to create confusion.

The Panksepps are honest, straightforward thinkers who cite Gould with approval and repeat many of his criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology.

The confusion that many in the field of Evolutionary Psychology felt was, as far as I can see, mere denial. They just did not want to hear that they were often merely speculating, that the background knowledge that would make their endeavors useful didn't exist yet. That they were, as far as science goes, wasting their time.

[There follows in Carroll a long hostile gloss of two New York Review of Books pieces Gould wrote attacking Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology, but I don't really see the point of the gloss or what precisely is being advanced by Carroll through it.]

The two ideas for which Gould has generated the most publicity are “punctuated equilibrium” and “spandrels.”

Gould’s one other big idea is that of “spandrels” or non-adaptive structures. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” is probably Gould’s best-known essay. . . .

The elements in these two ideas that are substantive and valid were integral parts of Darwinism before Gould formulated them, associated them spuriously with anti-adaptationist intimations, and popularized them with catchy phrases. Gould’s own distinctive contribution to these two concepts, insofar as they have consisted of ideas that were substantive and that were not already part of the Darwinian synthesis, have proven to be either compatible with mainstream adaptationist thinking, relatively unimportant, or simply wrong. . . .

Gould's complaint was not generally about what pan-adaptionists were willing to concede was true, but rather what their practice reflected. His argument was that though EP may have said that spandrels and genetic drift and other change agents were possibilities, the possibility that they seemed to heavily favor in nearly all cases was adaptation.

In making spandrels into a biological metaphor, Gould blends two legitimate Darwinian concepts, but he spuriously represents this blended concept as an alternative or supplement to the idea of adaptation through natural selection. One of these legitimate Darwinian concepts is pleiotropy or multiple genic effects: what Darwin calls correlated growth. The other legitimate Darwinian concept is the idea that previously existing structures can be altered through natural selection to fulfill adaptive functions. Darwin offers as an example the swim bladder that in the course of evolution is transformed into a lung (2003, chap. 6, p. 214). The tetrapod body plan also caught Darwin’s attention (pp. 219-220) and has remained a favorite example among evolutionists. The forelimbs evolve from fins to legs, and from legs sometimes to wings and sometimes to flippers. Another favorite example, discovered after Darwin’s time, is that of the reptilian jaw bones that have been transformed into the mammalian ossicles--the bones of the inner ear. (See Young, 1992, pp. 185-186; Moore, 1993, pp. 176-177, 412-414.) For adaptations that use either previous adaptive structures or previous structures of no adaptive value, Gould and Vrba (1982) have invented the term “exaptation.” This term is a variant of a term that was previously current—“preadaptation”--and the concept is itself a commonplace in standard Darwinian theory. . . .

Despite the confusions and ambiguities introduced through the architectural metaphor, none of the implications in the idea of spandrels is in any way contrary to standard adaptationist thinking. What Gould and Lewontin have attempted to do, though, is to use the metaphor to suggest, without quite saying it, that major features of complex functional structures have been produced independently of adaptive processes. Put this baldly, the claim is simply and obviously false, but unless it is put this way, the claim has no actual content that is not already part and parcel of standard Darwinian thinking. Since the time of his youthful foray into saltation, Gould himself has usually been careful, whenever he implies or suggests this false idea, also to say that he recognizes that complex functional designs result from adaptation, or that adaptation through natural selection is an “important” feature of the evolutionary process. The false and obfuscatory implications in the more radical understanding of “spandrels” are nonetheless its raison d’être, its chief purpose and function. It subserves the larger Gouldian program of minimizing in whatever way he can the general significance of adaptation through natural selection.
In order to achieve their aim of minimizing the significance of adaptation through natural selection without clearly and decisively cutting themselves off from mainstream Darwinism, Gould and Lewontin are driven to the necessity of perpetual equivocation, and the equivocation is rendered all the more impenetrable by being commingled with a pseudo-concept produced by breaking a single, valid concept into two parts and representing these parts as antithetical. The single, valid concept is that of “selection,” and the two parts are “selective force” and “constraints.” We shall begin with the equivocation and then consider the pseudo-concept. Once again spuriously invoking Darwin as an antecedent for their own anti-adaptationism, Gould and Lewontin repudiate the idea that Darwin was himself “a radical selectionist at heart who invoked other mechanisms only in retreat, and only as a result of his age’s own lamented ignorance about the mechanisms of heredity” (1979, p. 589). “This view,” they declare, “is false.” But then they also declare, in the very next sentence, that “Darwin regarded selection as the most important of evolutionary mechanisms. As do we.” As do we. Strange, then, that the whole thrust of their essay should be toward the conclusion that “constraints restrict possible paths and modes of change so strongly that the constraints themselves become much the most interesting aspect of evolution” (p. 594). Or as they explain in the head note to the essay, “the constraints themselves become more interesting in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs” (p. 581). Selection is the most important mechanism, but despite its importance, it is still not very interesting, somehow, not nearly so interesting as other things that are not so important.
The idea of a selective force operating independently of constraints--the idea of selection operating in a vacuum, independently of all actually existing conditions--is something like the idea of one hand clapping. When the idea of selection is placed in antithesis to the idea of constraints, it ceases altogether to be an intelligible idea. It becomes a pseudo-concept, a rhetorical term that is devoid of any conceptual content other than the confusion caused by the faulty way in which it is formulated. One might suppose that this feature of the concept--its lack of any content other than the confusion generated by the way it is formulated--would help to explain why it is so uninteresting, but it could hardly also explain why it is still “important.” Gould and Lewontin have here drifted into a very strange region of “thought,” a region much more familiar within the confines of postmodern literary theory than within those of evolutionary biology. Like Derrida or Foucault, Gould and Lewontin bring to bear sophisticated analytic and rhetorical skills, but these skills are oriented not to the production of clear and distinct ideas but to exactly the opposite, to the construction of pseudo-concepts that obstruct clear thinking.. . . .

In his eagerness to minimize the significance of adaptation through natural selection, Gould is, in wish and emphasis, anti-Darwinian. But since, within the range of scientifically reputable evolutionary theory, there is no actual alternative to Darwinism--no alternative, that is, to adaptation through natural selection as an explanation for complex functional structure--Gould can never say fully what he wants to say. His plight recalls that of “Atticus” in Alexander Pope’s “An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot.” In Pope’s depiction, Atticus (Addison) wished to satisfy envy and spite without making himself vulnerable through open attack. He thus developed a proto-Gouldian rhetorical technique that enabled him to “Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; / Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, / Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike” (1969, ll. 201-204). . . .

Among Darwin’s contemporaries, the one figure who most resembles Gould in his use of sophistical equivocation is the paleontologist Richard Owen (1804-92), who wished, on the one hand, to affirm that animal forms are determined by “archetypes” that are not related to one another by lineage and, on the other, to represent himself as having originated proto-Darwinian evolutionary ideas. Darwin responds to Owen’s equivocations in the historical sketch appended to the third edition of the Origin, and he there comes closer there to a snort of satirical contempt than he ever comes in responding to any other writer, even to Lamarck. “It is consolatory to me that others find Professor Owen’s controversial writings as difficult to understand and to reconcile with each other, as I do” (2003, p. 84). Darwin himself operates in good faith, and his overriding assumption is that others do also, even when he fundamentally disagrees with them. In his Autobiography, he remarks, AI have almost always been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice” (1958, p. 125). Coming from a man who had received so many violently hostile reviews, this remark reflects a presumption of good faith so ingenuous in its benignity as to fall little short of the sublime. But Owen is so flagrantly and unmistakably not operating in good faith that even Darwin’s simplicity of good will is finally roused to an awareness of Owen’s deviousness and duplicity. One can only speculate how Darwin would have responded to Gould. He might well have wondered whether Gould is, as Maynard Smith characterizes him, merely confused, or, as Dawkins characterizes him, downright dishonest. To my own eye, it seems evident that Gould is not himself confused, though it is his purpose that his readers should be.

I quote this at length because the text itself really puzzles me. Somehow Carroll has seen around a corner of the Spandrels argument that Maynard Smith, who thought the piece a solid addition to the conference he was hosting, did not see?

What the hell is the Owen comparison about? (I can't find anything to really nail YOU on, but you remind me quite a bit of Joseph Stalin . . .)

While Gould may have been guilty of exaggerating the innovativeness of some of his thinking, he certainly never made this claim for spandrels. the innovation of the spandrels argument was the illustration--and he and Lewontin say so--and the purpose was to re-emphasize non-adaptive change in the face of a then recent heavy emphasis on it--also this is all in the text itself. Perhaps having actually read the spandrels paper may have alleviated Carroll of some of this seeming confusion.

And having read Derrida and Foucault, I find Carroll's lumping of Gould and Lewontin into the same sentence with them laughable indeed. Lewontin is usually a perfectly clear writer. Gould is fairly clear, though sometimes a bit overwrought, but with a bit of effort he's far from obscure. Unlike your own passage above, I'd say. While grammatically unchallenging, a lot of its argument escapes me, and what I can perceive is just wrong.

The pointless lecture on constraints might be better illustrated by a lengthy citation of works in which Richard Dawkins talks at length about constraints on selection. He acknowledges they exist, but this is not his emphasis. The disagreement between Gould and Dawkins et al is about EMPHASIS not about innovation, or wholly new ways or wholly separate ways to approach evolution. Anyone who has read very much in the literature should know that.

And if Carroll still has problems with the spandrels metaphor, it is explained in a series of letters in response to Orr's review of Pinker in the New York Review.

Collective Responsibility First

2009-05-02T11:31:00.002-04:00

All the President's Accomplices
How the country acquiesced to Bush's torture policy.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Saturday, May 2, 2009, at 8:18 AM ETT

The use of torture on suspected terrorists after Sept. 11 has already earned a place in American history's hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era. Even liberal societies seem to experience these authoritarian spasms from time to time. It is the aftermath of such episodes—what happens when a country comes to its senses—that reveals the most about a nation's character. How do we come to terms with having betrayed our ideals?

This Salon piece really gets to what I think we ought to be thinking about right now instead of looking to put CIA interrogators on trial.

We ALL knew it was going on, we all knew they were waterboarding, torturing, kidnapping people, etc. We all knew and only a very few of us made a real issue of it. Too few even raised an objection. Far too few to make it the sort of issue that makes politicians fear for their jobs. Why did WE acquiesce? And why are some of us now so eager to scapegoat our functionaries? The guilt lies all around--convicting those who carried out what we allowed and tacitly encouraged isn't going to help. The people in the dock is US.

When we come to terms with that, only then should we think about what more particular responsibility others hold.

Paul Krugman's Naivete

2009-04-25T17:57:00.002-04:00

As a polemicist and as an economist, Paul Krugman is almost always worth reading. However, over the last couple of years I've been surprised at his political naivete--at his inability to anticipate how issues would play out in the public, and his blindness to the power game that always underlies the issues and policy debates.

Now, I am no great master of these, either, or I'd be working in Washington right now, but it surprises me that a guy like Krugman doesn't even have the level of political savvy common among urban newspaper readers.

Yesterday in the New York Times he wrote a piece encouraging the administration to back a full accounting of the torture of prisoners during the Bush administration. So far, so good. I actually agree that this ought to be a priority for the administration. We should know what happened because, clearly, there are a lot of people in the country who'd happily go down that road again. We really need to do something to head that off, and I'm pretty sure the more that comes out the worse Mr. Cheney et al are going to look. The Bush/Cheney administration made a fiasco of practically everything it touched. I have little doubt the interrogations were no different than the war in Iraq--badly done out of sheer incompetence and/or muleheaded ideological reasons.

However, Krugman seems laughable when he tries to dismiss Obama's reasoning for NOT focusing on the past.

Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.

It's laughable to consider the idea that the President would just go off about his business while an extremely high stakes investigation and possible prosecution took place over at Justice or in Congress. This would be time consuming, very time consuming, for the President. Who would then have considerably less time to oversee Geithner, Chu and all the rest. And I want Obama to be overseeing these folks. This would not be a move without costs. Remember how many important things went by the wayside when Clinton got mired in his own prosecution, in spite of the fact that few in his cabinet were directly involved?

Krugman notes that many who are calling for us to pass over the Bush-era abuses and work on the economy and health care were complicit in the abuses when they happened, which is true.

Also true is that we all knew what was going on. Nothing Obama has released so far is news to anyone who has read the papers over the last 8 years. Many who are calling for investigations and prosecutions were also complicit in the Bush abuses.

The failure of that era was general. Our institutions, out journalists, the political opposition, the administration, the majority of voters ALL made the trade of our values for "security." Ben Franklin wrote, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." He could have continued that, ironically, they usually get neither--which is what I think an investigation will find.

While I feel it is important to come to terms with the Bush era and our collective failures during it, I think we should recognize that it will not be done without cost. AND, because the failures were general, we should be exceedingly careful that this does not turn into a partisan bloodletting.

However justified we may feel in punishing some republican officials for what was done in the prior administration, we should realize that there will inevitably be retribution for it, and the cause will probably not be just when that retribution comes. In 18th century, each change of administration was followed inevitably by the impeachment of the major figures under the old regime, regardless of actual guilt. We don't want to set a precedent for a similar practice here in the US.

I would actually be fully supportive of a general amnesty for Bush administration figures who would cooperate fully with a thorough public investigation of the Bush-era security state. This, I think would be a good way to take a good hard look in the mirror without opening up an all-out partisan war.

More thoughts on The Economist & Sociobiology

2009-01-03T11:02:00.003-05:00

I had a few other thoughts about the recent run of sociobiological (or EP-influenced) articles in The Economist.

One was the prominent role played in them by the University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller.

Miller's main lines of thinking are 1)that the standard measure of intelligence (g) is a manifestation of some broader and more inclusive fitness; and 2) that the brain's growth--and the development of much of what we hold to be "human"--was driven by sexual selection rather than plain old natural selection.

I've taken a half dozen or so rigorous IQ tests in my lifetime, as well as a huge battery of other standardized tests that are built--more modestly--along the same lines, and frankly I have a fair deal of skepticism about how effective they are as a measure of anything.

Because they are culturally skewed? Maybe, but in a way different than most people who write on this issue seek to claim. Standardized tests require a great deal of planning, concentration and effort to complete to the best of your ability--my own SAT-family scores fluctuated wildly from the disaster of the hung-over PSAT to the glory of the very well prepared GRE. My scores--all prior to the re-curvings of recent years--were hundreds of points apart, even on the same test. I improved a friends score on the GRE by 400 points by training her in basic test-taking method and running her through several timed mock-tests.

So, obviously, a lot more goes into the scores on the test than anything we would usually call intelligence--mental, emotional and physical preparedness; experience with similar tests; motivation . . .

The work of Miller & his colleagues is probably controlled for the wider variations in these factors, so i have no doubt that they may be on the trail of some more inclusive "fitness factor" and will follow future studies with interest. BUT the way this work will be applied by amateurs in the field--and there are LOADS of them, ranging from loutish loudmouths on the internet to editors for the Economist to scientists from related fields who wish to be able to say something about social policy, affirmative action, urban crime, whatever. But few of these amateurs will understand Miller et al's work well enough to see its limitations. And Miller, et al. will be rather reluctant to disabuse the amateurs of their illusions because those limitations tend to make the work rather uninteresting to a broader public (those very interested amateurs included).

In short, few people are interested in intelligence testing or in a more inclusive fitness factor unless it can be used as a tool in contemporary ideological and political discussion.

One place we'll probably soon see Miller's work employed is in combination with the work of Richard Lynn, who has used global IQ test scores to explain global economic disparities. Conveniently, he can draw on exceedingly low IQ scores for sub-Saharan Africans, which are based on tests which are the best we've got but, frankly, utter crap. Why utter crap?--because they are completely uncontrolled for factors like those I list above--familiarity with the test, motivation to do well, the effect of local rules of etiquette on face-to-face questioning, etc.

So, Miller et al.'s inferences--that their IQ scores may be related to more general fitness will be uncritically extended to, essentially, all existing IQ scores, no matter how crappy they may be. We will soon be being told that the economic outcome we have seen over the course of industrial modernization--rich west, rising east, decrepit Africa--is nothing more or less than the verdict of evolution on our species.

And Miller, if he holds true to form for the newly famous handsome young scientist, will smile, say nothing and negotiate a bigger book deal.

Sociobiology again?

2009-01-01T08:57:00.005-05:00

Wow, it's been a while . . .

More news on the Economist:

The magazine has recently been on a bit of a sociobiology kick with several recent unsigned articles chawing the collective ear about the biological basis of human behavior. Here's what I've found over the past year or so:

# LEADERS: Evolution
Of music, murder and shopping
It is time to turn to Darwin to explain human behaviour
Dec 18th 2008

# CHRISTMAS SPECIALS: Darwinism
Why we are, as we are
As the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On The Origin of Species” approaches, the moment has come to ask how Darwin’s insights can be used profitably by policymakers
Dec 18th 2008

# CHRISTMAS SPECIALS: Human evolution
Why music?
Biologists are addressing one of humanity’s strangest attributes, its all-singing, all-dancing cultureDec 18th 2008

# THE WORLD IN: Leaders
Shocking science
Geoffrey Carr expects scientists to provide a year of celebrations and screams
Nov 19th 2008 Web only

# SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Evolution
Balls and brains
The quality of a man’s sperm depends on how intelligent he is, and vice versa
Dec 4th 2008

# CHRISTMAS SPECIALS: Beauty and success
To those that have, shall be given
The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand
Dec 19th 2007

And there's more naturally, much of it the work, one would suspect, of the magazine's science editor Geoffrey Carr.

I'm not at all opposed to the theoretical notion that our behavior, our morals our civilization & culture are all ultimately based on biology. I'm just skeptical that biology should be the thing we're focussing on.

The Economist makes a lot of the fact that murder rates, pretty much universally, peak at the time when there is the most competition for mates--teens to twenties--and rapidly fall after that. Interesting, but what does biology bring to it?

We already were perfectly well aware of the fact that violence was a young man's game--demographic research has contributed to social policy for quite some time--how does the notion that it may have an evolutionary explanation help policy makers?* I don't think it does.

(*Rather, we should say, the notion that evolutionary biologists can make up a story ex post facto that would seem to explain the phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective.)

And what is the evolutionary explanation for the more remarkable number on their graph--that the murder rate among males is 30 times higher in the US than Great Britain, across all age groups?

The other big point the article propounds is that even in an egalitarian society, outcomes between different population groups--between men and women or blacks and whites--may not be equal. In other words men and women, or blacks and whites may turn out to be different even when treated fairly. One would suppose that this theoretical proposition is pretty uncontroversial as far as men & women go (many of us have first hand experience of enduring differences between the sexes). Many might say that the subject of enduring intellectual differences between the races is an "unsafe" notion to bandy about, but even staunch enemies of this line of thought--SJ Gould, for instance--acknowledged that this is a theoretical possibility.

(Virtual marginal note: A lot of commentators make a lot of hay out of this attitude regarding "unsafe" thinking and (tiresomely) cry "political correctness" whenever it comes up. But wherever you ultimately fall on the idea of censorship and self-censorship, the anti-political-correctness folks don't some to realize that this conversation isn't just an intellectual game for some people. There is a long legacy of majorities using this sort of discussion to suppress minorities, sometimes with the very gravest consequences. The upside of free and open discussion of even heinous ideas can seem pretty modest when compared to the downside. And certainly the utter lack of consideration of what the stakes are at blogs like gnxp fairly cries out the prolonged intellectual adolescence of those writers.)

But the strong implication of the Economist articles--that we have already arrived at a time when we cannot assume that strong differences in "outcomes" between population groups are evidence of unfairness is patently and obviously false. Just a few years ago, people were making strong arguments on behalf of Larry Summers by pointing out that it was obvious that there women were innately inferior at mathematics to men. Now it appears that that isn't the case--very egalitarian societies show little evidence of an "outcome gap" in math--we only thought we had reached a state of fairness with residual unequal outcomes. Which, frankly, was clear to anyone who looked at the situation without ideological blinders.

The bit about race in the same (Dec. 20th) article is rather bizarrely credulous. We are told that people generally register three things about a person they meet: sex, age and race.

But Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby [two of the founding figures of the latest push to apply biology to policy] pointed out that before long-distance transport existed, only two of those would have been relevant. People of different ages and sexes would meet; people of different races would not.
The two researchers argue that modern racial discrimination is an overstimulated response to what might be called an “alliance” detector in the human brain. In a world where the largest social unit is the tribe, clan or what-you-will of a few hundred people, your neighbours and your other allies will normally look a lot like you, and act similarly. However, it is known from the study of modern hunter-gatherers, and inferred from archaeological evidence about ancient ones, that neighbouring tribes are often hostile.

Though an individual might reasonably be expected to know many members of his tribe personally, he would probably not know them all. There would thus be a biological advantage in tribal branding, as it were. Potential allies would quickly identify what marked them out from others, and what marked others out from them—and, because those differences would probably be small, the detector would need to be very sensitive.

So, in a world "where the largest social unit is the tribe, clan or what-you-will of a few hundred people" In a world where you spend every living moment associating with pretty much the same 2-300 people, we don't recognize them all? Admittedly, we wouldn't know them all well, but we would be able to recognize them. There would be no need for a super-sensitive "lineage detector."

Our awareness of race--and many of our other traits--has a more complex explanation that people like Cosmides and Tooby are willing to admit. they can't all be traced back to factors in some notional "early human environment." Some have roots that go back beyond early man, and beyond primates even. And many traits have a lot more cultural input than they'd like to admit.

In short, the origins of human behavious are complex and are not the place to turn for stunning insight about what we should be doing now. In fact, biological questioning of the the origins of our behavior seems to a) give us answers we already knew about, either because that's the story biologists wanted to tell us or because we all have an inherent ability to judge ourselves; or b) give us no good answers at all, as biologists radically simplify complex phenomena in order to imply they've got the goods when they don't. They tell us they know the etiology of social phenomenon X, when they don't really appreciate X as a phenomenon at all. How can they tell us how X arose, when they don't even know what X is?

All they really want to do is to say X is a function of my field of specialty, and you really should stop paying attention to X and start paying attention to me.

For most cases of X, X is more interesting than evolutionary psychology. And the study of social phenomena as they manefest themselves to us today is infinitely more likely to provide us with answers and progress than the study of evolutionary biology.

And as economics suffers from a crisis of credibility, it may seem only natural that the Economist would turn to economics' cousin evolution for a boost. But this totalizing system is not much better that the others we suffered through in the last century. One would hope the Economist would in the final instance make a stand for the particular against the sloppy totalizers.

Justice: Wall St. Journal vs. the Economist

2008-08-14T15:48:00.003-04:00

One thing I've always liked about The Economist, in spite of the fact that I've never shared their sometimes too-fervent worship of the market, is the basic humanity that they hold up.

Though the liberal, free-market tradition has all but disappeared in the US, where being a free-marketeer seems to mean you must be narrow minded and provincial, in England it still seems to be possible to be an enthusiastic capitalist and to be tolerant, broad-minded, and able to admit to mistakes.

This article below is an example of the Economist at its best, I think

Sarah Conlon, campaigner for the innocent, died on July 19th, aged 82

Pacemaker Press

GOD knows she did what she could to keep her son Gerry safe. She called him to be in by seven for his tea, to stop him thinking he might wander down to Gilmartin’s pub or to the card-schools on the corner. . . . Sarah Conlon wanted their life to be respectable, holy, and quiet.

Guiseppe, her husband, was too ill to do much. He had worked at Harland & Wolf red-leading the hulls of ships, but the lead had got into his lungs and damaged them. . . .

When she last saw him in 1980 he was in Hammersmith hospital, dying. But he was handcuffed to a bed like a cage, with two warders guarding him. He had been in prison for five years, sentenced because the British police believed he had something to do with the IRA bombings at Guildford and Woolwich in 1974. In truth he had had nothing to do with it at all. He had been in England to get Gerry out of trouble, and it was not the first occasion.

And almost the next time she saw him he too was in prison in England, not for burglary, which he deserved, but for five counts of murder and conspiracy. Her son was now one of the “Guildford Four”, her sick husband one of the “Maguire Seven”, together with her brother Paddy, her sister-in-law Annie and her two schoolboy nephews. The British police, desperate to frame whoever they could, said Annie had a bomb-making factory in her kitchen in Kilburn. But Mrs Conlon knew how tidy she was, her house impeccable, and with a picture of the Queen on the wall.

All the years that Gerry and Guiseppe were in jail she tried to do what she could. . . .“Pray for the ones who told lies against you… It’s them who needs help as well as yourself.”

Prayer definitely helped. Had she not been doing the Stations of the Cross in the cathedral three nights a week, and had a priest there, Father McKinley, not noticed her crying when the 1977 appeal was turned down, she might never have been able to get her campaign going to free her relations and the others. But within a short time, many others helping, she was harrying MPs and ministers, the taoiseach and Cardinal Basil Hume himself, until in 1989 she was at the Old Bailey, a white carnation in her hand, to see the Guildford Four’s convictions quashed as unsound. The Maguires’ were overturned two years later. And she was not done yet. She had always wanted the British government to apologise, and in 2005 a petition was signed by more than 10,000 people. Tony Blair said sorry, and sent her a copy; and though she never sought the cameras, she posed for them with Gerry and the letter.

I've edited that, and it's well worth reading in its entirety.

Thank goodness no one in our country would think of manipulating the justice system to influence public opinion: to make people think there's a threat and that the threat is well in hand.

And no one in our country would think of excusing the jailing of innocents, or treating schmoes like Gerry Conlon as if they were big fish criminals, the worst of the worst.

And certainly no newspaper editor could countenance justifying these sorts of things.

The Hamdan Validation
Wall St Journal editorial
August 9, 2008; Page A10

On Thursday, a war crimes tribunal sentenced Salim Hamdan to a mere five and a half years in prison, which, with credit for time served, means that Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver could be released as early as January. To borrow the obligatory media idiom, this "raises questions" about the process -- namely one: Could anything happen at Guantanamo that isn't "a stunning rebuke" or "an embarrassing blow" to the Bush Administration?

The sentence came down a day after Hamdan was absolved of the more serious of the two charges leveled against him. The prior political narrative was that the commissions amounted to a new Inquisition. But never mind. Some eminences claimed that Hamdan's partial acquittal really meant he had been found "guilty as ordered." Now a panel of senior military officers has rejected the 30-year sentence prosecutors requested -- and we are told that also counts as a strike against military commissions.

If anything, Hamdan's sentence again validates the fairness and due-process safeguards embedded in the system. The jury was independent and conscientious in its deliberations -- to a fault, perhaps. Hamdan, after all, was far from the hapless chauffeur his white-shoe lawyers portrayed. During his trial, the prosecution played a 1998 video that showed Hamdan guarding bin Laden with a machine gun. Presumably al Qaeda's leader didn't hang around with armed personnel he didn't trust.

Hamdan could be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant, but the political explosion that option would touch off makes it all but untenable. In five months, he is likely to be repatriated to Yemen. What's bizarre is that even the release of a member of al Qaeda won't convince the anti-antiterror movement of the legitimacy of military commissions.

And not a word about the administration that asked for a 30-year sentence for this man (and would have asked for the death penalty, no doubt, if they thought it would fly)?

It's a good thing these guys are manning the barricades in defense of justice. We wouldn't want anyone to be unfair to the Bush administration. Surely it is unfair to exaggerate the degree of their abuse of and contempt for every principle this country was founded upon.